Although i havent played it, there is I believe enough info to form a valid opinion.
To give my opinion on the new WOW xpac..... Ive played enough wow to know MOP is a complete disaster..... I visualized playing it in my head and it was bad.

Last year at this time, WOW had 9.1M subscribers. Anyone with any common sense would either look at year-over-year numbers, or at the very least compare point-in-time with expansions. WOW has always had ups and downs depending on the cycle within an expansion. It really calls out your bias that you can´t even begin to have a rational thought. Talking to you about anything related to WOW is like talking to someone about politics who watches Fox 10 hours a day.

WOW has 9.6M subscribers and earns a billion dollars a year.. any other MMO that you happen to think is even remotely close has well less than 1M subscribers, and almost all of them are free. AOC lost 50% of it´s subscribers in 3 months after launch, SWTOR was about the same. 50% loss a few months after launch... and you really think WOW is terrible because it lost 10% of it´s subscribers 6 months after an expansion launched?

Give it up dude, you will be on these forums for the next 4 years saying the same crap, and always talking about the impending doom and death of WOW. Cata was a bad expansion and cost the game some subs, but since the lowpoint of Cata, the game is UP by more subscribers ( .5M) than most games have total in players.

So really, tell us, what is your MMO?

Q4 2011 saw a loss of 100k subscribers taking the total number of subscribers to 10.2 million.

Why is it not rational to believe that WOW will continue to lose subscribers? Why do you think the performance of other games is important does it change the fact that WOW is losing subs? Where did I say that WOW is terrible? I like WOW, I play WOW and will continue to do so until I feel it is no longer worth the sub fee, am I not however blind to its and Blizzard's faults.

Why is it not rational to believe that WOW will continue to lose subscribers? Why do you think the performance of other games is important does it change the fact that WOW is losing subs? Where did I say that WOW is terrible? I like WOW, I play WOW and will continue to do so until I feel it is no longer worth the sub fee, am I not however blind to its and Blizzard's faults.

If you enjoy it then why do you even care about sub numbers unless you are comming here just to argue for the sakes of arguing.

Its not because of what blizzard has done.
Its more about their new line in skylanders and the new COD.

As evil as the monetization of Skylanders is from a "wanted to play new Spyro game, wtf is this toy shit making me spend all my money" perspective, you gotta hand it to the activison folks. That shit is motherfucking GOLD

Theron/Bloodwatcher 2013!

Originally Posted by Alsompr

Teasing, misdirection. It's the opposite of a spoiler. People expect one thing? BAM! Another thing happens.

If WoW was expected to decline, but didn't decline nearly as fast as expected, that would cause a great increase in the estimated net present value of the franchise. And that would be reflected in the stock price.

---------- Post added 2013-02-09 at 03:00 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Alastaircrawly

interesting but let me clear up some figures here

Cataclysm:
544 million - 12 million before launch
339 million - 11.4 million

Mist:
345 million - 10 million PLUS
277 million - 9.6 million

Note quite right, since Cataclysm launched twice: once in the west, and once in China. The quarter after the first launch saw a loss of 600K; the quarter after the second launch saw a loss of about 500K in China.

If Cataclysm had launched simultaneously in both markets the loss would likely have exceeded a million accounts.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

If WoW was expected to decline, but didn't decline nearly as fast as expected, that would cause a great increase in the estimated net present value of the franchise. And that would be reflected in the stock price.

---------- Post added 2013-02-09 at 03:00 AM ----------

Note quite right, since Cataclysm launched twice: once in the west, and once in China. The quarter after the first launch saw a loss of 600K; the quarter after the second launch saw a loss of about 500K in China.

If Cataclysm had launched simultaneously in both markets the loss would likely have exceeded a million accounts.

True but before the Q4 numbers we kept hearing 10 million plus now its 10 million.

True but before the Q4 numbers we kept hearing 10 million plus now its 10 million.

Are you quibbling over rounding errors now?

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

Well, it IS in contrast with Zynga games and their free to play stuff.

Subscriptions have been a fixed income for the stock and as of now, WOW is the only kid in town with this regular income.

I predicted that this would happen.

One eye in the land of the blind as we would call it.

Having 9.6 million paying subs while the rest of the MMORPG industry turned (mostly) F2P and you have this lucrative market to you alone.

It is a question of market posession really.

The sub model is not sustainable with low volume. A market leader can decide to use a higher pricing model because they are market leader.

Originally Posted by Osmeric

Are you quibbling over rounding errors now?

No, he/she is merely pointing out a factual error. Nothing more, nothing less. We don't know how much "well over 10 million" means. Its one of the aspects I critisize WoW's numbers for. The other one being a sub isn't a sub (a sub in EU/US brings more money in the pocket than one in KR or CN).

It doesn't really matter anyway, Blizzard's profits and the profitability of WoW has continued to increase even as subscription numbers have fluctuated. Their earnings have yet to actually decrease during a quarter.

For a product that's nearly a decade old it is extremely profitable -- any company would be lucky to have it in their portfolio. It'll remain profitable for years to come, even if the subscription numbers decline suddenly.

The biggest thing they have to worry about WoW is profit growth slowing down. Honestly, they'll probably be able to maintain profitability on World of Warcraft pretty much indefinitely, but it's eventually going to stop being the primary focus of their earnings. Blizzard's longterm profitability is really going to rely more heavily on Project Titan than WoW. If they can hit it out of the ballpark again with Titan, everything will be fine. If it flops, they'll be in trouble.

HOLY SHIT and we all wonder why our economy is going to shit. First off Activision is a Huge company blizzard is only a small part of what makes up activision. Blizzard hardly effects the stock of the entire company. Majority of the time what drives a stock price up or down in ANY market is the nature of activity for that stock on that market. Titan won't cause trouble for blizz one way or another. Yes it is nice to have success like wow in a portfolio but one product won't drive a stock up or down by an extreme.

Especially in a market like entertainment/ video games. Only apple with its freak iphone phenomena pulled that off and that doesn't happen all the time. Yet if you look at micro soft that stock is doing shit and nearly everyone and there mother has windows on there computers. That's a product and clearly it isn't effecting that stock like you'd think. Why would wow be any different in nature for a product and stock relationship.

So even if activison made nothing but horrible games its stock still has a chance to go up. The biggest factor on a stock, any stock is its nature on the market. People could just be buying it to get it a high price just so they can dump it later at a higher value. Its a common trading technique known as being a bull.

Granted current events do effect stocks but I guarantee wow isn't driving that stock up 10 points. Black ops probably had a way bigger impact on their stock then any game to date. even then id still be a skeptic of how that stock is doing. Cause its still not a huge gain.

So next time you get your cookie puss all wet about the stock market and your favorite game. Go to your economics class and learn something.

Here is a stock market rule to live by when your doing your bullshit trading online "don't pitch the bitch", or for online purposes don't let your mom or gf/wife do your trading. learn to play the real world AH sometime not just the one on wow.

HOLY SHIT and we all wonder why our economy is going to shit. First off Activision is a Huge company blizzard is only a small part of what makes up activision. Blizzard hardly effects the stock of the entire company.

33% of Activision-Blizzard revenue this year came from Blizzard. 33% isn't really a small part, it's rather large.

While it is true that the stock price isn't only Blizzard dependent, one can't ignore that WoW sub numbers are still massive, and that Blizzard had 2 major titles this year (MoP with 3rd best selling retail game, and D3 being best selling game of all times on PC). This probably did have a positive impact on their stock price.

Why is it not rational to believe that WOW will continue to lose subscribers? Why do you think the performance of other games is important does it change the fact that WOW is losing subs? Where did I say that WOW is terrible? I like WOW, I play WOW and will continue to do so until I feel it is no longer worth the sub fee, am I not however blind to its and Blizzard's faults.

Depends on how you mean "lose subscribers". They will always lose subscribers, but they'll also gain a few back. At the end of Cataclysm people said it's all down from here because we hit 9 million. But now subscriber numbers are higher than that.

What? The Midas touch? Let's see in the past year they have fallen foul of Korean and German authorities for ignoring basic customer rights and their flagship game has yet again failed to hold on to its customers.

Can you give a source about that German stuff?
Because all I can find is that they were threatened by some group with a lawsuit, not that they have "fallen foul of German authorities".
And it's great that you just ignore what I said and keep on ranting on useless stuff.

Fact: Stocks went up 10%.
Fact: MoP is third best selling PC-game of 2012.
Fact: Diablo 3 is the best selling PC-game of 2012.
Fact: Starcraft 2 had great reviews and sold incredibly well.

So yes, to investors it seems like everything they touch becomes gold.
Where other companies fail to even get their game above a million subs and lose 60% of them within a year, Blizzard manages to only lose 4%
That is what we call a success.